Healing through Renewal

The need for change can be seen on many levels: political, personal/psychological, spiritual, and even in the forms of nature. The urge to change, to heal one’s ills, to move forward, and the opposing resistance to altering what is familiar are considered through a psychological lens and in a classic myth of the South African Bushman.     

Soul Healing: A Model of Feminist Therapy

A feminist psychospiritual model of therapy that can be used in working with clients who value the spiritual dimension in their lives is offered. The history, philosophy, and work of Women for a New World, a multidisciplinary team of women representing the areas of psychology, religious education, and the arts is presented. Using examples drawn from the developmental history of our retreat-workshop paradigm and from some of our programs, including a weekend retreat for women and a day of reflection for persons affected by AIDS (including family and friends of those with AIDS), the metaphor of therapy as soul healing is developed.     

A Typology of Ritual: Paradigms for Healing and Empowerment

Myth and ritual are the keys to collective and individual cognitive consonance. Because the postmodern cultural landscape is littered with “broken” myths, people need to learn how to birth viable symbols and create contemporary rituals. This article examines ritual from theoretical, clinical, and practical perspectives. Symbolic cognition and its relation to myth and ritual are discussed. A typology of ritual is abstracted from phenomenological sources. Examples of liberation, transformation, and celebration rituals are given. Elements commonly employed in ritual activity are identified as guides to ritual construction. Finally, suggestions are given concerning how to create powerful and effective personal rituals.     

Spirituality and the Process of Healing: A Narrative Study

Hutch's proposal to use Henry Murray's wholes or total-person approach for understanding the psychology of religion, although reasonable on the surface for at least one outlook, is rather simplistic, jargon laden, and convoluted. Hutch goes far beyond mere accommodation to the wholes argument to an exclusionary, reductionistic, and even indoctrinating application of Murray's methods. Failing to adequately warn of variations in interpretation, precision, awareness of motivation, environment, and awareness of one's own vulnerabilities and mortality and of subjective selection of biographies in studying lives as religious transformation, Hutch nonetheless makes a valuable point in questioning the absence of mortality and body in texts and indices on the psychology of religion.     

Hebrew Healing: Jewish Authenticity and Religious Healing in Canada

This paper describes a Jewish healing group, referred to as ‘Yehi Ohr’, and discusses strategies for constructing religious authenticity employed by Yehi Ohr's leader and the rabbis who have assisted in leading Yehi Ohr's service. A discussion of the participants in the healing service follows, with an outline of their criteria for authenticity and a focus on the range of their healing experiences. By demonstrating the centrality of these strategies for achieving authenticity in the work of Yehi Ohr, the paper points to the importance of issues of authenticity to the success of this religious healing group and proposes that authenticity may well be central to the work of other healing groups in pluralistic, postmodern settings.     

The Huichol Offering: A Shamanic Healing Journey

An American transcultural psychiatrist, and a Mexican engineer deeply involved with the Huichol Indians, build a team that heals a decade-long epidemic caused by sorcery. Huichol children in boarding schools became possessed by demonic witchcraft that transformed them into aggressive animals. Many local shaman had been called in to treat the illness but had been unsuccessful. The team found a way to incorporate traditional belief and ritual, with modern psychological principles to weave a healing story. This article represents the ultimate integration of mind/body/spirit medicine to heal across cultures.

Language, Love, and Healing: A Psychoanalyst's Perspective

This lecture addresses the task of psychotherapy as enabling both patient and therapist to feel personally alive, sensibly responsible and to be able to experience compassion and civility. Freud's notion of the end of analysis issuing in a capacity for common unhappiness is examined. The metaphorical nature of psychotherapy is the frame for understanding these concepts.He is associate editor of     

Healing through meeting: A dialogical approach to psychotherapy

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

A Defining Presidential Moment: 9/11 and the Rally Effect

Public approval ratings of George W. Bush surged after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. This study used a quasi–experimental, within–respondents design to investigate the relative contribution of five factors to this classic rally effect: the stimulus event itself, Bush's speech that evening, media exposure, partisan support, and gender effects. Respondents were pretested on the morning of the attacks; one group was posttested immediately after the speech, another group 41 hours later. Stability of effects was examined through an additional study of Bush's 20 September 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress. The findings indicate that Bush's 11 September speech was the critical factor in this rally effect; none of the other factors contributed significantly.     

Healing and Hell: The Contradiction

There are apparent contradictions within New Testament texts concerning everlasting punishment for some, as opposed to the ultimate reconciliation of people in God. It is here argued that we should affirm the latter for theological reasons. Incidentally, there are major pastoral benefits from this affirmation. There are further social and criminal justice challenges which we may also welcome with thanksgiving.     

Ecumenism and Renewal in Brazil: an Appraisal

The ecumenical experience is a call to an experience of renewal, as it makes a challenge for a new form of being-a-church to all of the ecclesiastical proposals crystallized over the centuries. For this reason it demands a decisive opening to cultural, political and religious experiences. These do not always correspond to the criteria maintained by the ecclesiastical institutions, but they contain and manifest in their own way the fundamental values of the gospel.